People whine about bureaucracy in congress. Get that president in line. Tell your senators what to do Goddamnit. They protest. Form tea parties rallies. Write letters. These patriots are gonna fight the man and the depths of hell will not stop them

These people are amateurs. This afternoon I walked into an institution where bureaucracy knows no bounds: Rite Aid. When I go to the pharmacy it’s like going to a gun fight. I have my paper prescriptions in one holster, the refillable bottles in the other. I know this is going to be a war.

Pharmacists have to follow regulations to the letter, and there are more regulations than pills in a bottle. So my simple quest to pick up an ol’ prescription becomes like slaying a minotaur deep inside the labyrinth: my prize, some little blue morsels in a bottle: my quest: a maze of insurance denials, miswritten or misread prescriptions, expiration dates 1 day past, and ornery, jaded pharmacists who just wished they could have been doctors.

With reservation, I place my prescription on the counter. You can’t be too careful with these people; there are rumors of pharmacy techs morphing into labyrinthine chimera on cue. My rule: never get too close. So at arms’ length, my scrip falls gingerly to the counter to be scooped up and examined brutally by the mythical beast in a lab coat.

“Oh no,” the pharmacist says, as she taps out letters on a computer keyboard. “Your insurance won’t be covering this.” High gear mode sets in. What is this pharmacist talking about? I thought insurance and I were pals. Last month the insurance company and I frolicked together with ponies and kittens, with rainbows showering down pharmaceuticals as they joyfully covered my prescription. But now it looks like things have changed. Maybe they don’t think this love affair will work after all. But insurance company! We were so good together!

I go to the ultimate source to trample the insurance company bureaucracy: my mother. Dialing her digits on my phone, holding back hyperventilating breaths, I told my knight in shining apron the situation: the insurance company had some kind of procedural problem now that I had a new ID number on my insurance card. “I’ll take care of this,” she said. I provided her with names and phone numbers, and told her to call me back. Thank god for mom, I thought, because all I could say was “screw perscriptions. I need a beer.”